Nominet is to make thousands of super-short .uk web addresses available for as little as £10 each in a "land rush", due to kick off next month.
The .uk manager will release 2,640 previously reserved one- and two-character .co.uk, .org.uk, .net.uk and .me.uk domain names, starting 23 May.
Many single-letter and single-number …

Re: honest gov

aa?

Why was American Airlines awarded a .co.uk domain - surely it should have been the Automobile Association which is at least a UK based organisation. (Or Alcoholics Anonymous, but they're international aren't they?)

That's the Royal Auto Club

So why would RAC want aa.co.uk when they've already got rac.co.uk and presumably everyone knows them by that name? Is there another auto association in the UK?

(It's Auto Association in NZ and ZA, and they've got aa.co.nz and aa.co.za. Oz has aaa.asn.au – cute a whole TLD for associations. But at the risk of stating the bleeding obvious, NZ and ZA ain't Blighty.)

No it isn't

wah wah

Any person on earth can register your "prized" .co.uk at any domain registry, so I'd have to conclude .co.uk is not UK firm or even UK specific. The fucking point? Either you allow foreign entities to register .co.uk, or you don't. How would you implement "primarily"? You gave up your national domain a long time ago, unlike some other European countries.

Almost...

The WHOIS is not broken

The WHOIS is behaving as expected. As documented on the Nominet website (http://www.nominet.org.uk/registrants/aboutdomainnames/reserved/registrarsinfo/) this will not be updated to allow two letter domains until the reserved domain process is complete.

This means that the WHOIS will display the "naming rules" message for any two letter domain which has not yet been registered. The ones which you say "work" have already been registered, so the normal domain information is displayed for those.

Never Seen the Point

I've never seen the point of a very short domain name unless it is actually your company name.

bt.com for example makes sense while y.co.uk doesn't. I know Yahoo! have been known the throw Y! around as a logo, but nobody calls them Y, they call them Yahoo.

People who don't know the URL for a company's website is likely to either try the full company name or use a search engine. Indeed the search engine route is probably more common. How many people are going to try the first letter or maybe first two letters of the company name?

redirects

Bear in mind the proliferation of shortened links for redirects (e.g. bit.ly); if Yahoo! can grab a piece of that market, they get some data from the requests which can be datamined to potentially help search results.

When did they get to own the letter y?

I agree that it might be counter-productive for Yahoo to use y.co.uk as their domain, but if they want to bid for it, let them, its their money.

But why on earth did they Yahoo get priority? y.co.uk could be a lucrative domain name, similar to ask.com, which other companies might have wanted to bid for. Unlike bt, which is strongly associated with a large company to the extent that it could hardly mean anything else, y is just a letter which happens to pun with why.

you sound like a reputable person...

@AC 19/4/11 10:31

The point of a short domain name is to be memorable and easier to type. Sure, many people don't bother and use search engines for websites, but that needs good keywords which can be promoted by other parties. Given the explosion of use of mobile internet devices with crummy keyboards, having short and memorable domain names is more important than ever before. Also if you have to input email addresses in such devices quite frequently search engines won't help with that.

aa. fools co.uk =american. pah

Wasn't given away

I think you're perhaps misunderstanding the process. During the sunrise period, anyone could submit an application for why they think they should get the domain. If a domain received more than one application, it went to auction. So American Airlines have the domain because they bid the highest. It wasn't given to them.

it's not our AA

> this should have rightly gone to our uk automobile association

The AA demutualised just over 10 years ago and was bought by Centrica (which once upon a time was called British Gas). Centrica sold it on to a private equity firm. So it belongs to them. It's their AA, not yours or mine. Last time I looked, the AA merged with Saga and was being lined up for a flotation on the stock market.

Oh and most of the time it's first-come, first-served when there are competing demands for the same domain name. Bank of America is rather pissed off that British Airways got first dibs on ba.com.

Been looking through some of the one-letter domains

There seems to be quite a distinct split between domains that have gone to the appropriate people (can't see anyone arguing with q.co.uk going to Q magazine for instance) and domains that have been snapped up by seemingly opportunistic companies with no real claim as far as I can see (z.co.uk went to Zurich insurance, c.co.uk to some content writing company, u.co.uk seems to go to a link farm...). If I was Nominet I think I would have been a bit more selective in who I gave these domains out to.